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The annual Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas is the largest electronics show in the U.S. these days. It's so big that small companies easily get lost among the industry giants and their huge, noisy show floor displays. But there is a press-only 'pre-show' called CES Unveiled that gives visibility to companies that don't have 20' tall displays full of celebrity shills and other razzmatazz. So, in hopes of finding some products more interesting than the inevitable CES "Oh, look! Our latest TVs are 2" wider than last year's models!" blather over incremental improvements to existing products, Tim Lord went to CES Unveiled -- and found a few products that were not repeats from previous years. Good products? Useful? Maybe, maybe not. You decide.

Tim:
The Consumer Electronics Show is something you can predict every year
because some kinds of electronics are really categories into
themselves, like TVs that are slightly bigger, somewhat cheaper,
slightly thinner or with a somewhat greater resolution. And that’s
great as all those slightlys compound over the years, but bigger
changes like the move from CRT to flat panel technology, they are
less frequent.

So it’s
fun to seek out some of the wackier ideas on display, many of which
are shown off at a sort of pre-show called CES Unveiled, where a
relative handful of companies have on display everything from robots
to search engines to household sensor arrays, even NPR was on hand.

Here are
a few of the things I spotted around the unveiled show floor.

First, is
the navigation device from Schwinn, it’s meant to give riders
an easy way to get around by bike using GPS or without taking their
eyes off the road.

Interviewee:
I am [Scott Rice] with Pacific Cycle, and we’re here at CES
introducing the new Schwinn CycleNav bicycle navigation device. It’s
turn by turn, visual and spoken directions specifically designed for
cycling.

It works
off of your smartphone. Simply download the app on to your Android,
iPhone or Outlook phone, put in where you want to ride to. Then we’re
going to show you the routes. You’re going to get multiple
route options, you simply hit start, put your phone away and CycleNav
kicks in. So CycleNav is going to both give you the speaker voice
directions and the visual signal directions. Turn by turn navigation
down to 50 meters.

Tim:
Now what’s the back end?

Interviewee:
The back half?

Tim:
The back end, map support?

Interviewee:
We use MapQuest so it’s basic. We’ve tailored the mapping
data specific for bicycles, so it preferentially chooses bicycle
paths, bike lanes and bicycle from the roads.

Interviewee:
March, so we’re going to be launching them in March, it’s
going to be available retail in March for $59.99. You can go to
schwinnbikes.com
for more information and they are also going to be available at
retailers like Walmart, Academy, Meyer and other fine retailers.

Tim:
Why does Schwinn Bicycle have

Interviewee:
Any bike, any model, any brand, CycleNav will work with, so lithium
ion -- rechargeable lithium-ion battery technology. They get about 10
hour life and simply just recharge it, hooks up to your Micro USB
connector.

Tim:
Kickstarter gets more visible every year as a development matrix
for new products. What I liked is a light bulb design to go
gracefully through power failures.

Interviewee: Hi
there. My name is Suman. I’m the founder of [HI FI Systems]and we created a very unique LED light bulb. This LED light bulb
looks like a normal light bulb and it works like a normal light bulb
every day, like you can turn on and off the way every light bulb
works. But the unique thing about this light bulb is when power goes
out, there is a power failure, it still works like a normal light
bulb, so what it means is, even there is no power, you can turn on
and off from the same wall switch without making any change. Only
thing I have to do is replace your existing bulbs with this light
bulb. So, I will do a demo.

So, this is the main
power. This is our light bulb, [smart chart], that’s a normal
light bulb. Now when power goes out, your whole house will be dark
except our bulb. It will remain on, but not only this much. Now, you
can still turn off from the same switch and turn on even there is no
power. So, our technology senses what is the switch position
regardless there is a grid power or not.

Technology, what we do,
we send a very small signal with code and this signal does three
things, first it finds out if there is a grid power or not, then it
finds out what is the switch position and then it finds out it’s
a two-way switch or three-way switch and based on that, it makes the
decision it should be on or off and it does it in less than a
millisecond. So, it’s just working all the time and makes the
decision what it should do.

Tim: How long will
the bulbs stay on?

Suman: It will
stay on about four hours, continuous use, in a power failure
situation.

Tim: And although
TV may be an example I gave about incremental change, SEIKI was on
hand with a TV upgrade that I think is pretty cool. It’s an
up-converter in a cable to make old media better suited for new TVs.

Interviewee: What
we are looking at is a new technology from SEIKI, we call it the
U-VISION, up-scaling technology. It is usually Technicolor, 4K, which
means it’s been approved by one of the biggest Hollywood
post-production houses in the world that says this is a great
product. What it does is actually take your standard definition and
also your HD content at home and beautifully up-rezzes itor
up-converts into 4K so that you can watch it on your 4K screen and
have a better digital entertainment experience.

What we want to do is
make 4K adoption a lot more practical and easier, so that you can buy
a 4K TV and enjoy it at home with the current content that you have.
We know a lot of movies are shot in 4K, but they are not available
and with that, we are waiting, basically it’s a waiting game
for a lot of the content providers, motion picture studios who
provide the content. They have to be assured that this is what people
want, but we are very confident that it is the next standard of TV,
and with that content will follow. We’re also hearing some
great news from YouTube, Netflix and also Amazon saying that they’re
going to shoot a lot of content in 4K.

For SEIKI it was very
simple. We knew that there was a big demand from our current 4K
customers that they want a better up-scaling technology. We found it
and a partner of ours which called Marseille Networks, and they
provided one of the world’s best video processing chip
available for 4K. We thought to put that into the TV, but that would
mean that our current customers will not have access to the
technology, so what we decided to do is put it into a HDMI cable, we
call it an active technology cable, so that you could actually have
the cable and use it with various other TVs, doesn’t have to be
SEIKI and other source devices that these up-rezzing content for 4K.

Tim: Now it’s
got a chip inside, how is that powered?

Interviewee: It’s
powered by USB, so you have to make sure your TV has a USB port, plug
it into HDMI and have your USB port into your – one of those
service ports, but it’s powered, and have that available and
then you can power the processor to do the up conversion to 4K. It’s
very simple to use. If you have just standard definition content like
480 or 720p content, it will actually up convert it to 1080p and give
you a lot of enhancements. It does real time detail enhancement, adds
restoration, so like characters on screens look a lot better, noise
reduction, so it cleans up a lot of the images at the same time.

But what it really does,
it take 1080p content and upscales it beautifully to 4K Ultra HD
content. The HDMI standard that we currently support is the current
standard which is 1.4; as far as supporting the future standard,
those standards has to be clarified first and what that’s going
to be and what’s going to require and we do have a product
roadmap for this technology, so we will support any of the future
technology from HDMI that’s a standard in our future usage of
products.

So you can look forward
to usage into with all the supporting technology for the next
generation of 4K TVs. It will be available on online retailers as
well as our old website. The price point is at $39.99, but the great
news is that if you’re already a SEIKI customer with a 4K TV,
we’re going to provide one of these for you complimentary,
provided that you give us a serial number that we can match it to, so
that you can have the experience at home.